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At a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, members of Congress grilled Google CEO Sundar Pichai about a variety of topics, from user privacy to the possibility of a censored Chinese search engine. But the focus of the hearing was political bias.

"A while back Republicans passed legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare," said Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio). During the debate over that legislation, Chabot said, he Googled the Republican legislation and "virtually every article was an attack on our bill. It wasn't until you got to the third or fourth page of search results before you found anything remotely positive."

Chabot was just one of several Republican committee members who charged that Google's search algorithms—and its employees—were biased against conservatives. But Pichai stood firm, insisting that Google has rigorous procedures in place to ensure that the personal political views of Google employees don't undermine the objectivity of search results.

Republican members of Congress weren't really buying Pichai's responses. But the question is whether they'll try to do anything about it.

The Republican party has traditionally favored less, not more, regulation of business. Some Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators have started suggesting that there should be an exception made for Google given its vast online footprint and its perceived liberal bias. But Republican policymakers still seem quite far from taking decisive action on this front.

Google is becoming part of America's culture war

Republicans spent a fair amount of time at Tuesday's hearings establishing that a lot of liberals work at Google. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) pointed to a leaked video from one of Google's weekly all-hands meetings shortly after the 2016 election.

"After President Trump won, your co-founder [Sergey] Brin said 'most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad,'" Gohmert said. "Now a lot of us saw the video. We saw how upset a lot of the top people at Google are. For you to come in here and say there is no political bias at Google tells us you either are being dishonest or you don't have a clue how politically biased Google is."

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) grilled Pichai about a recently leaked email sent out shortly after the 2016 election by Eliana Murillo, a director of multicultural marketing efforts at Google. In the email, Murillo described Google's efforts to increase turnout among Hispanic voters—an effort she initially characterized as nonpartisan.

Further Reading

But in the same email she goes on to describe Trump's election as "devastating for our Democratic Latino community. After all these efforts and what we thought was positive momentum toward change, the results are not what we expected at all." In short, the email made it clear that Murillo, at least, had a partisan agenda.

Pichai told Jordan that an internal investigation had not turned up evidence that Google was engaged in partisan political activities.

Meanwhile, some Democrats came to Google's defense. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) sarcastically reminded his Republican colleagues that Google's search algorithms were protected by the First Amendment.

Republicans for antitrust enforcement

It was a bit odd to see Democrats like Lieu defending the free speech rights of corporations while Republicans called for stricter regulation of a private company. Ordinarily, of course, the shoes tend to be on the opposite feet, with Democrats advocating stricter regulation and Republicans defending free-market policies.

Some Republican committee members acknowledged this tension during Tuesday's hearing.

"My conservative colleagues and I are fierce advocates of limited government," Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) said to Pichai. "We do not want to impose burdensome regulations on your industry."

However, Johnson said that conservatives in Congress had "a duty to ensure that the engine that processes as much as 90 percent of all Internet searches is never used to unfairly censor conservative viewpoints or suppress political views." He called on Pichai to implement safeguards against political bias "so that the government doesn't have to intervene."

Further Reading

"I don't want to regulate anything," said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). But he signaled that regulation could be on the table if Google doesn't change its policies.

King demanded that Google publish full details about its search algorithms. If those details aren't forthcoming, King said he would consider revising Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—legislation that currently shields online providers like Google from lawsuits over user-generated content.

This has been an increasingly common refrain on the political right. Fox News host Tucker Carlson regularly criticizes Google for monopolistic practices.

"Since it has the power to censor the Internet, Google should be regulated like the public utility it is, to make sure it doesn't further distort the free flow of information to the rest of us," Carlson said last year.

Regulating Google wouldn't be easy

Theoretically, President Trump also favors stricter antitrust enforcement against technology giants. In a November interview with Axios on HBO, Trump said he was "looking at" stronger antitrust enforcement against Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Trump's problem is that most Republican-leaning antitrust experts don't agree with this viewpoint. Since the Reagan years, most conservative intellectuals have favored looser antitrust enforcement—a position that's popular among the GOP's allies in the business world.

And antitrust decisions are supposed to be made independent of interference from the White House. As a result, the Trump administration's antitrust agenda has not been dramatically different from that of previous Republican presidents. In September, Trump's choice to lead antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department, Makan Delrahim, questioned whether there was "credible evidence" of antitrust violations by large technology companies.

If Republicans were serious about curtailing the power of Google and other technology giants, they would need to do more than hold a few hearings on the subject. They would need to develop a roster of conservative antitrust practitioners who favor stricter enforcement—at least with respect to technology giants. Or else they'd need to pass new legislation specifically regulating the companies.

Republicans are pretty far from doing any of that. And if they did, Google would have strong defenses available. If a future Republican administration brought an antitrust case against Google, it would have to convince the courts that Google was engaged in anticompetitive conduct—an argument that the courts might view with skepticism. Directly regulating Google's search algorithms could be even dicier, since Google would be able to invoke the First Amendment.

Promoted Comments

“I searched for Congressman Steve Scalise,” the Democrat said. “He is a Republican. The first four articles that came up were generally pretty positive.”

He went on to ask Google CEO Sundar Pichai if the search engine generates “positive articles on these search results,” to which the tech executive said no.

Lieu continued by performing a “real-time Google search” where he changed “Scalise” to “King,” referencing Rep. Steve King (R-IA) who was present at the hearing and has been in the news lately over his ties to the white supremacist movement.

“The article that pops up is from ABC News, ‘Steve King’s racist immigration talk prompts calls for Congressional censure,'” Lieu said. “That’s a negative article, but you don’t have a group of people at Google sitting there — to modify search results, [so] every time Steve King comes up, a negative article appears — that’s not what’s happening, right?”

“We are trying to reflect what is currently being discussed about that phrase,” Pichai replied.

Lieu concluded his speaking time by preaching to his Republican colleagues about what generates bad press:

“Let me just conclude here by stating the obvious. If you want positive search results, do positive things. If you don’t want negative search results, don’t do negative things. To some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you’re getting bad press articles and bad search results, don’t blame Google or Facebook or Twitter. Consider blaming yourself.”

Moral of the story, it's not a conspiracy for people on the internet to call you a piece of shit when you act like a piece of shit.

I mean sure be mad, but the trolls out there work on their search engine optimization to make sure the top results for their targets are negative ones.

If I watch one streaming video on YouTube, or anything related to The Last Jedi, 4 videos later, I'm being recommended videos by Ben Shapiro, and if I don't stop autoplay before THAT video plays, then there's at least one *REALLY* racist recommended video in the next set.

I don't see congress complaining about the Youtube algorithm.

Weird. Most of my Youtube recommendations are clips of Dragonball Super, cooking shows, and how to make weird stuff out of PVC pipe.

Quote:

For many casual YouTube users, the Google-owned video service is a harmless way to waste time, listen to music, or maybe even learn how to install a new appliance. But if you dig below the surface, as the non-profit research institute Data & Society does in a new report, you quickly start to see odd or even disturbing links to right-wing pundits and conspiracy theories. This is YouTube’s alter ego, what sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has called “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” And it’s not a coincidence, the report says—it’s a deliberate attempt to radicalize users by pulling them into a vortex of reactionary content.

Seems a bit far fetched but don't take my word, try it for yourself. If you can escape all of google's tracking, make a new account watch a few fortnite videos and a maybe a Logan Paul video or two and see what recommendations you start to get.